Life in a Straight-jacket

This is probably the most obvious thing I've ever written, but I need to get it off my chest: academic writing is such a pain.

It's so ironic that the medium we use to think about creative texts is so hampered by convention, that the creative presentation of thoughts about those texts becomes near impossible.

It also bugs me that because academic writing has to be so formal, it fails to mirror the organic patterns of thought. All that referencing makes a mockery of real life. I mean in real life, we're constantly referencing people, ideas, songs, moments, images without caring to stop and denote them all.

I understand the copyright/intellectual property issues, and the need to create a universal language of sorts in order to be internationally consistent. But referencing and the so-called "objective" academic writing style is so overbearing, and fails to acknowledge that all thought is a conversation that flows quite randomly at times.

Having flirted with the idea of pursuing an academic career, I'm quickly realising that I really dislike how removed from reality the academic world is, and how it tends to ham-string human expression no matter how post-modern the pedagogy (and that's coming from someone who went to UTS, where we were sometimes encouraged to write ficto-critical-make it up stuff).

Having said all that, I think the world of ideas is really important, because it all trickles down eventually. But far out, it's frustrating living in that head space for too long. You just want to talk to people, throw some ideas around, be real about what we do know, and most of all, what we don't know. Well at least, that's how I feel mid-essay right now.

Oh and don't get me started on the restrictions of news writing....

** I love that I wrote this entire post without referencing anyone, like Foucault, or Bourdieu. hah take that redundant french theorists (hmmm).